37. Taking Notes: Editorial on Three Musical Educations, by Michael Porter
You’ve undoubtedly noticed how many areas of contemporary life are now subject to curatorial survey? For example, according to certain counselors, relationships can now be curated. On the internet, there is “content curation” and “marketing curation”. Indeed, few areas of “life experience” are currently safe from such augmentation and control. Develop authority and you become a part-time schoolmaster of sorts. (Those who can’t curate, teach.) Here is where social power is found today. We go to the theater or concert hall to be sometimes entertained and more often educated. In 2020, we find versions of the blackboard and the laser pointer whenever the lights go down or the curtain goes up. I used to think that live venues might be copying old-fashioned classical and pop CDs which characterized themselves as Theme Albums, but lately whenever I visit Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, an insistently didactic mood hovers over the programming. On the airwaves, Jeremy Denk styles himself as an educator as well as a concert pianist. As Artist-in-Residence of WQXR and WNYC’s Greene Space, he will soon regularly explore how Bach’s music can “help to unite us in these divided times”. Chautauqua evenings hope to heal a fractured comity. Audiences bond as captive students. A shared and encouraged academicism thickens the air.
Very 92nd Street Y. Get your study guides out.
I understand that toward the end of his life Jerome Robbins would watch performances at New York City Ballet from the orchestra and sometimes engage his seatmates, whether friends or strangers, in on-site impromptu lectures before and during the evening’s program. If you allowed him to expatiate, he offered his students tutorials on the art’s finer details, pointing out what to watch in the upcoming spectacle. (There was always an equivalent poster-board quality to this choreographer-director’s stage work, wasn’t there?) If the student-balletomane seemed a good learner by final curtain, perhaps she or he would earn a gold star. But sometimes at the ballet, one may prefer an artwork rather than a lecture.
Those music lovers who follow the local concerts of the pianist Danill Trifonov may have caught his Zankel Hall appearance two seasons ago, an evening which was built around a survey course in twentieth-century music for the piano, one representative piece from each decade. Trifonov was clearly sharing his current discoveries in modern music with his faithful public. Last week, the pianist presented an evening of Bach at Alice Tully Hall. His central offering was the complete Art of Fugue, a musical experience that challenges a reader of the score, the performer who would traverse it whole over one evening, and the audience which wrestles with its infinitely complex sound world. Trifonov has the virtuoso technique to address many of the complexities of Bach’s vision.
Since Trifonov was performing the work on a modern piano (rather than a harpsichord or organ), his reading revealed more than the kind of dry, near-mathematical syllabus taught by some interpreters. A piano creates its own ambiance. Trifonov is known hereabouts as a composer as well as a concert pianist, so it was possible to hear in his Bach his own discovery not only of the liturgical aspect of the score’s period but the work’s anticipations beyond the Baroque era, as though Trifonov was identifying the Fugue’s prefigurations of subsequent musical history. Thus, his Contrapunctus 3 revealed jazzy syncopations; number 7 featured a roiling bass line that suggested Lizst; and number 11 allowed the pianist certain techniques of sectional partitioning as instinct with Romantic contrasts as Schumann. It was thus possible to look over the shoulder of a creative artist as he reviewed his tradition through the lens of Bach’s musical genius. And perhaps we could sometimes even hear a hint of the coming synthesis that Trifonov may eventually achieve out of his analysis of such influences toward musical compositions of his own. Perhaps such a mind can be allowed its self-edifications in public, whereas another instrumentalist could be thought by his captive audience to be benignly pedantic.
At the Metropolitan Opera (currently closed to safeguard audiences against the coronaviral pandemic), Handel’s earliest operatic success, Agrippina, was revived this season in a representation conceived and directed by Sir David McVicar. The composer’s contribution (recognized for its “grandeur” and “sublimity” by its original 1709 audience) inspired minimal trust in the 2020 McVicar, who turned his production into a comic burlesque through scenic updating and references to celebrity culture and political corruptions. This ambition for a novel staging was heavy-handed when not second-hand, so that the general tone of the evening resembled the safely satiric critiques of modern Italian culture in the films of Paolo Sorrentino (La Grande Bellezza).
Confident vocalism was the primary victim of the approach. Joyce DiDonato (as Agrippina) lounged about upon the frayed cushion of a diminished technique. Brenda Rae (Poppea) was given so much slapstick business, much of her vocal production was semi-gulped. The Met audience was thus encouraged to watch rather than to listen. It is true that the fine operatic libretto of Vincenzo Grimani has a comic element, but a mock-strip tease for the Emperor Claudio (Matthew Rose) is nowhere found therein. The one performer to register clearly, both vocally and mimetically, was the mezzo Kate Lindsey as Nerone. Her comic version of a teenage punk-tyrant managed to combine clear diction and vocal accuracy with a dance-like physical elegance that undoubtedly owed something to choreographer Andrew George. Lindsey possesses old-style sprezzatura. On the evidence of this production, the Met may not be interested in encouraging a Handel performance tradition for the house, especially in musical terms. Sometimes voices and traditions do have to be developed over time. As Balanchine once put it, the Met erects its circus tent every morning and takes the rigging down every night. No continuity. No future. Roustabouts rule.
Updating is very much on the mind of artistic director Ivo van Hove in his new production of West Side Story installed at the Broadway Theatre. Van Hove has long kept his eye on the cinematic canon for properties ripe for stage translation (see his Faces, Teorema, Scenes from a Marriage, India Song, The Servant, and Network). Up soon on the West End – his version of The Shining. Van Hove is unsparing in what he removes from his source works. The first element discarded in the new West Side Story was Jerome Robbins’ stage direction, which in 1957 was recognized as substantive in its achievement. The second element to be jettisoned was Robbins’ choreography, replaced by the contributions of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, her consultant Sergio Trujillo, and possibly even associate producer Patricia Lucia Delgado, once a ballerina with the Miami City Ballet. The question is raised: is this really West Side Story if Robbins’ direction and choreography are omitted? And, if not, what is it?
Van Hove probably sees himself as the production’s auteur. He has attempted to update the racial constituents of the two gangs, the immigrant Sharks and the homeboy Jets, but only in the most selective of fashions. Where, I wondered, were the secret young Russian operatives exacerbating racial tensions for foreign political ends? Couldn’t at least one of the Jets be a neo-Nazi skinhead? No, von Hove proves to be on the side of his mixed-race punks. “A Boy Like That” includes giant video close-ups of good-looking, disadvantaged boys: his is a West Side Story for tweens. Indeed, social media-bred youngsters in the audience will undoubtedly applaud the director’s emphasis on “immersive” digital technology as a substitute for any performance style from within our local theatrical tradition.
Van Hove himself dreams of regularly combining stage action and video (both recorded and live), undoubtedly using the 1961 film of this musical as a partial precedent. Jerome Robbins’ original Broadway staging was famous for its “filmic” shorthand and narrative fluidity. The Robbins-Wise movie cannily literalized and extended this aspect of the stage version. In 2020, van Hove takes us one step further. Thanks to persistent video projections, his West Side Story becomes a theme-park ride down dark urban streets, while its foregrounded live protagonists sing and dance beneath the sensory overload. Martin Scorsese’s recent analogy of modern cinema’s superhero franchise films as “theme park” creations is thereby translated by van Hove directly onto the Broadway stage. Audiences may now desire primarily to be overwhelmed, and van Hove aims to please. The ghost of Robbins persists in certain surviving fleet narrative transitions that propel the evening and in the work’s version of poetic realism, which van Hove converts into message-mongering with little touch of the lyric or the paradoxical. His is a tendentious – rather than a poetic -- auteurism.
A real artist might have aimed for a post-modern stylistic collage out of the combination of old-new elements, those video projections and the live blocking, but this director doesn’t go the distance. In the one videoed scene in the new production that actually works – the static “One Hand, One Heart” in the bridal shop – you notice to one side a whispy Kleenex tissue in its carton waving eloquently in the a-c breeze. The viewer’s eye goes to the livid video image because such realistic detail feeds visual appetites. No movement detail in the new dance numbers can compete, especially when veils of rain and fog obscure the action. Then, too, much of van Hove’s video content emphasizes ideology with literalistic underlining. “Gee, Officer Krupke!” features minority incarcerations on the big screen. The young singer-dancer-actor cast is largely abandoned to its own devices beneath billboard sized adverts for the auteur and his proud virtue-signaling.
With the cooperation of various producers (including Scott Rudin, Barry Diller, and David Geffen), van Hoven curates his CV. Stage and film classics become his public collectibles. Who can ever forget that fine British actor Ben Wishaw as John Proctor in van Hove’s The Crucible, reduced to crawling on his belly across a New York stage in his Broadway debut? Possibly Wishaw was proud of being allowed “experimental” work in an American classic. But was that really the play by Arthur Miller?
Van Hove is abetted in his musical theater ambitions by his chosen dance-maker collaborators. Their “Cool” becomes an attempt to combine stage dance and video action. (I believe this is termed “interdisciplinary” art.) Two public spaces -- Doc’s candy store and the bridal shop -- are recessed scenically at the back of the Broadway Theatre stage. Initially keeping the female Jets on ice in the video version of the store doesn’t really pay off when what they do once they spill onto the big stage is weakly choreographed. “Cool” is no longer a hot number. It is accompanied by garish lighting effects straight from a Las Vegas show palace.
Maria’s bedroom has been sequestered, on the other hand, in an offstage wing. The audience suddenly finds itself watching a projected “video-movie” of this private area rather than an on-stage performance. Maria’s removal to the wings here is part of the reduction of this role in van Hove’s version. Not only has “I Feel Pretty” been cut, but the original Robbins “Somewhere Ballet” has been excised. It is now a brief “Somewhere” duet between Tony and Maria that must explain the heroine’s change of heart after learning of her lover’s murder of her brother. I don’t think van Hove is much interested in Maria. (Imagine Shakespeare uninterested in Juliet.) The use of the talented Yeseina Ayala as Anita results in little directorial guidance: the role (perhaps the key one in this show) acquires minimal resonance. It is not projected over the footlights. Even the rape scene takes place in a far video corner of Doc’s shop and is shot with a shaky, low resolution camera (cliché alert!).
Perhaps the problem throughout is the jarring shift in scale between cinemascope projections and live figures trapped like tiny specimens on a vast, virtual soundstage surrounded by live feeds. It’s a form of electronic surveillance. The deer park goes digital. Its denizens do a great deal of hapless walking and running around on the sample slides. Robbins’ directorial stage skills of economy and distillation are especially missed at critical narrative moments. In the big rumble scene, I couldn’t locate the key moment when Tony knifes Bernardo. Was that missing detail deliberate? Or was I confused by the cluttered hurly-burly of the action? Just before Tony is shot, van Hove prepares us with a low sonic hum over the sound system. We’ve heard that aural effect before. Maria is asked to run down an aisle of the house to discover her dying lover (yet another staging cliché). Welcome to van Hove’s West Side Story World.
One wonders what the Robbins Estate said when told that the famed property would be produced on Broadway without Robbins’ contributions. One wonders what the Bernstein Estate thought when told that the score would be heavily cut. About these matters, a silence reigns except, perhaps, for the ka-ching of someone’s cash register somehow, somewhere.
The best local example of the integration of video with live stage performance that I have encountered would be the 2013 Jay Sheib production for New York City Opera of Thomas Adés’ Powder Her Face at BAM. The brilliant video artist there was Josh Higgason. His use of on-stage cameras and projected images illustrated a version of celebrity culture and incipient tabloid exposé. Nothing in the current West Side Story (scenic and lighting design by Jan Versweyveld) is on that level of artistry. Avant-garde, it isn’t.
Broadway now trends toward facsimiles of facsimiles, electronic simulations preferred. For some, Augmented and Virtual Realities can’t come too soon to our commercial stages. What used to be honored was artistry, or professionalism, or genius. Now it’s resurrection. (So Republican Party.) At the Hammersmith Apollo in London, the late Whitney Houston currently appears nightly in a holographic version of her stage presence singing sixteen numbers to excited audiences. Undoubtedly, this apparition will soon visit New York. And at the movies? With the approval of the James Dean Estate, next year Worldwide XR will composite a digital version of the actor for a role in the forthcoming movie Finding Jack. This appearance will be Dean’s fourth in a feature-length theatrical film. Carrie Fisher’s return from beyond in her Star Wars role was just the beginning. Ours is becoming the age of Baudrillard’s simulacra. Who would have guessed that The Matrix got there first and got it right?
M.P.
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